Davey Martinez announced late last season that the club would only use a total of eight starting pitchers in 2023, and that the pitchers and coaching staff would work together to keep pitchers healthy and replace the post each time it was their turn in the rotation. He said he was proud of the fact that he had raised his score. .
“A lot of people have already asked me, ‘Hey, how did you manage to get through a year on your own?’ [eight] starter? ” Martinez told reporters. “And I just laugh.”
“I don’t want to give anything away,” he explained. “But I said part of it is the players understanding what they have to do during the start. Maintain their strength, their mechanics.
“[Pitching Coach Jim] Hickey works with the mechanics every day to keep them as clean as possible. Strength coaches and everything else and obviously we went with a six-man rotation, which definitely helped and we’ll probably seriously consider that in the future.
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“But with that said, I’m proud of them. [We were] We monitored everything they did every day and made sure they were there.
“There were days we had to force them to work, but they did it. And it worked out well for all of them.”
Club GM Mike Rizzo (He is also the president of National Capital Baseball Ops.), stated that in 2024, the reins will come off of some major league arms with some experience at the major league level.
“I think we’re going to be cautious,” Rizzo said at the Winter Meetings in December.
“We’re always careful. But this year we’re going to take those reins off a little bit. Last year, we were careful with them and handled everything with kid gloves.”
Veterans Patrick Corbin and Trevor Williams (who returned to starting after a few years as a swingman), Josiah Gray, Mackenzie Gore, and Jake Irvin all survived their respective seasons, while three other pitchers (Joan Aydon started 10 times, Chad Kuhl started five times, and Jackson Rutledge started four times) Contributed. With Corbin and Williams entering the final year of their respective contracts in DC, it’s important now to strengthen the young starters and prepare them for future years when the club expects to return to competitive play. .
“I think we’re going to loosen the reins a little bit on them this year,” Rizzo said.
“We have some depth in the minor leagues, but we haven’t had that much in the past. And I don’t think it’s going to be easy to really learn in the big leagues. Last year we had some depth with these pitchers. I think we’ve seen progress, and hopefully all of these pitchers can take another step in their progression and replenish some of their own prospects from the minors to the major leagues.”
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One obvious step their managers would like to take is to allow their starting pitchers to play deeper games in 2024, loosening or loosening the reins to some degree and allowing their captains to play pitchers in the future. I hope to get more innings from him.
“Hey, look, we can go back to 2019 and the pitching staff that we had,” Martinez also said when speaking at the winter meetings. “Those guys pitched until the eighth inning and we won because of our pitching staff. They kept us in the ballgame.
“I always say the same thing to young players: If you give us 18 to 20 outs as a starting pitcher, we’re going to do big things.”
“I still believe that. I know the game has changed a little bit, but the starting pitchers need to give us innings.”
